Let me guess, you’re docking the dough using one corner of the dough scraper. Actually, this is not the correct form of docking for a pizza dough as the corner of the scraper completely penetrates the dough, thus perforating it, rather than docking it. In docking, the tool used must be blunt so it doesn’t penetrate al the way through the dough, in order to be effective, the docking tool must compress the top of the dough sheet down to the bottom of the dough sheet and lock the two together, similar to tack welding two sheets of steel together. If the take a look at a cracker, you will see that the docking holes are not clean all the way through, there is a thin membrane of dough on the bottom of the cracker. That membeane is the compressed dough from the docking pin. This is why a fork is also a poor docking tool, since it penetrates the dough rather than compressing it. If it wasn’t so hard on your fingers, you could use them very successfully, to dock the dough, blunt, so you can’t penetrate all the way through the dough, but alas, they are a bit on the large size, and it seems like a good way to end up collecting on workman’s comp. But even with this, I still see a few operators docking their dough using their fingers, I’ll stay with my plastic dough docker.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor